You’re able to alter the appearance and format of your video by adding specific tags to your video. You can add these tags before you upload your video file to the site, or you can also add the tags to edit an existing video that you’ve uploaded to your account in the past. The video’s altered appearance will display when the video plays on YouTube, and in embedded players.

Here’s how!

If you’d like to add formatting tags to a video file you’re about to upload:

1. Sign into your YouTube account, and click the yellow upload button.
2. On the next page, click the “upload video” button. Then, select the file you’d like to upload from your computer.
3. As the video file’s uploading, you’ll see categories below the upload progress bar, including the category “Tags”.
4. Depending on how you’d like to format your video, type on of the following tags into the “Tags” section:

* Tag: yt:crop=16:9
(zooms in on the 16:9 area, removes windowboxing)

* Tag: yt:stretch=16:9
(fixes anamorphic content by scaling to 16:9)

* Tag: yt:stretch=4:3
(fixes 720×480 content that is the wrong aspect ratio by scaling to 4:3)

* Tag: yt:quality=high
(default to a high quality stream, depending on availability)

5. Once your video uploads to the site, it should be formatted according to the formatting-tag you added while the video was uploading.

If you’d like to add formatting tags to a video you’ve already uploaded to your account:

1. Sign into your YouTube account, and click account (in the upper right hand corner of the page).
2. Click Uploaded Videos, and select the video that you’d like to edit.
3. Click the “edit” button below the video.
4. Depending on how you’d like to format your video, type on of the following tags into the “Tags” section:

* Tag: yt:crop=16:9
(zooms in on the 16:9 area, removes windowboxing)

* Tag: yt:stretch=16:9
(fixes anamorphic content by scaling to 16:9)

* Tag: yt:stretch=4:3
(fixes 720×480 content that is the wrong aspect ratio by scaling to 4:3)

* Tag: yt:quality=high
(default to a high quality stream, depending on availability)